The Northern Territory government is going to try implementing the $100 laptops for remote regional schools.

NORTHERN Territory schools will become the first in Australia to test a revolutionary new laptop computer that costs just $US100 ($128).

…

 ”(The Department) is keen to look at an extended pilot where a whole class of students use the laptops for an extended period to establish the learning benefits and identify the associated teaching strategies and resources required,” a spokesman said. “The department is particularly interested in how the $US100 laptops can be used to extend the already substantial computer and network resources installed in remote schools, into the homes and lives of indigenous students.”

Despite what the article states, the laptops aren’t ‘hand cranked’.  That was going to be part of the original design, but was dropped because the movement could damage the machine.

There’s some pretty extensive info on the Wikipedia page for the project.  To be honest, I’m surprised the NT government is considering this.  Seeing as the laptops are specifically designed for ‘developing’ countries, is this the beginning of the government admitting that we’re allowing our remote regional communities, especially Aboriginal communities to live in 3rd world conditions? According to the article, the Queensland Education Department has described the machines as “far below the requirements” of students in developed countries. Either the NT government disagrees, or they indeed believe that regional NT is ‘developing’.

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Percy Cabello on Mozilla Links has posted about the recent Gran Paradiso developers meeting where they discussed the new features in Firefox 3.  They came up with a list of features, separated into mandatory, highly desirable & ‘nice to have’. 

The mandatory features were:

• Improved interaction with Add-ons: clearer, more coherent language; less steps to install; more visible way to configure add-ons, probably to be moved back to the general Options window, which I hope deeply; more noticeable alerts when updates are available; a permanent restart Firefox button.
• Support for remote bookmarks, bookmarks and history annotation.
• Files could be handled by web services. If I am reading this correctly, this could mean you would be able to click on an attached document and open it with something like Writely or Google Documents. Or perhaps, as I asked Santa, the ability to redirect mailto: links to web email services.
• A much needed print support to prevent cut paragraphs and true WYSIWYG.
• The much requested MSI installer which will be a much welcomed improvement for IT administrators as it will ease deployment and updating of Firefox across a company.
• In the security front: support for Microsoft CardSpace and OpenID (check tomorrow’s article for more coverage on this). Smarter credentials handling.
• Airbag, the Google backed open source crash reporting tool will replace currently licensed TalkBack.

These would all be cool, but the two best features I saw were on the ‘highly desirable’ list:

• Save web pages as PDF files, plus integrated with history. That would be just awesome.
• Support pause/resume downloads across sessions.

Both of those would indeed be just awsome.  You can see the full list with details plus other info on the Firefox 3 requirements doc.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 was released in December and according to the Mozilla Release Roadmap, final release is due November 2007 (est.). Another alpha is due in the next couple of months.

IEBlog announces that Microsoft has released the 3rd beta of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. The biggest update seems to be to the CSS interface with the ‘Style Tracer’ to show what styles are being applied to the currently selected object.  That works nicely, but the subsequent ‘Trace Style’ and ‘CSS Selector Matches’ have no effect on my browser (IE 7 on Win2003). 

From the Internet Explorer Dev Toolbar Wiki:

UI refresh - A single button on the toolbar that opens the DOM inspector and reorganised menus
Style tracer - Find where the style is defined by right clicking on the style attribute in teh right pain
View Source - Both the generated and original source as well as the source for the selected elements.

Even without that working it’s still really good, it runs fast and does pretty much the same things that the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar does, at least all the things that I use it for anyway.

It’s nice to see this evolve into a useful developer tool, especially for people like me who need to do cross-browser development.  Remember the Developers Developers Developers!

via Gadgetopia

From J Wynia, how to explain marriages to geeks:

So, in essence, having a good marriage is like working in a loosely typed language and you’ve just got to have really good exception handling. Once you’ve built up a good library of wrapper methods for how your spouse communicates, things can just cruise right along and work smoothly.

Or I guess you can throw an exception to be handled by the divorce() method. But that seems like a pretty bad approach.

Classic, read the whole thing.